Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Albert Cooper, fully Albert Glen Cooper

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast.

Accident | Events | History | Reason | Wisdom |

George Croly

All history is but a romance unless it is studied as an example.

Example | History | Romance | Wisdom |

Barry Commoner

Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival.

Fault | Power | Survival | Technology | Weapons | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors... are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts - in short, the psychological factors - are considered as unimportant and secondary.

Wisdom |

Friedrich Engels

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

Anarchy | Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | History | Individual | Man | Means | Necessity | Organization | Plan | Society | Struggle | Time | Will | Wisdom |

E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Confidence | History | Office | Self | Self-confidence | Wisdom | Afraid |

Edward Everett

Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.

Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |

Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher

One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Excitement | History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Wisdom | Following | Respect |

Lawrence K. Frank

We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present.

Events | History | Mankind | Present | Will | Wisdom |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Nothing in history has turned out to be more impermanent than military victory.

History | Nothing | Wisdom |

Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

A people living under the... threat of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It doesn't not haggle over armaments and military expenditures. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is a fine thing for the financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

Discussion | People | War | Wisdom |

Michel Foucault

Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Constraint | Distinguish | History | Means | Myth | Politics | Power | Reward | Society | Solitude | Study | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Society | Child | Privilege | Value |

Joseph Gerrald

Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish; but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.

Aid | Discontent | Era | Eternal | Folly | Freedom | History | Madness | People | Principles | Purity | Reverence | Truth | Tyranny | Will | Wisdom |

Oscar Handlin

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

History | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the an who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

Death | Dread | Existence | Life | Life | Pleasure | Solitude | Wisdom |

Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future.

Future | History | Past | Wisdom |

John Grier Hibben

In the pioneer days of our history it was easy to love one's neighbor and respect his rights, when possibly the neighbor lived at a distance of four or five miles and the relations were not intimate enough to occasion a clash of interests. Now one finds that society rather than another individual is his neighbor.

Enough | History | Individual | Love | Respect | Rights | Society | Wisdom | Society | Respect |